Night Writing

Night Writing is a fresh collection of poetry by Kathryn Lomer – winner of the 2008 NSW Premier’s Literary Award – Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize. Divided into five sections, this delightful book explores lyrical phrases formed in evocative fragments – short, succinct but rich with meaning, encompassing a variety of themes including love, sensuality, nature, change and emotion.

Lomer’s writing is especially absorbing because it is so deeply personal. She seeks to bring us into her world, to inspire us, engage us and to share with us the brilliance of living, with thoughts as unique as individual fingerprints. There are delicious connections between words, unusual combinations of ideas and unfamiliar associations that frequently allude to the senses.

In ‘Gilded’, Lomer recalls childhood adventures – horse riding, the irresistible elements of danger and the intense excitement of youth and blissful new experiences. Fragments of memory are woven together in a unique flow of consciousness, wielding the weapon of first-person language with effortless expertise:

The emotive, tender and warm descriptions that Lomer evokes are deep with meaning as she writes about caring for a horse. The following passage is quite reminiscent of the act of human intimacy:

My hands were all over him:
I picked up his hooves gently,
Hooking out the sour scent
From a tender frog,
Amazed at the soft secrets beneath horny feet.
Curry comb, brush, hay and oats:
This is how I learned to care for another,
The looking-after love requires. 

In ‘Mother Hand’, Lomer explores her own personal responses to sign language from the new Auslan dictionary. Her words echo the gentleness and reassuring tone of caregivers or mother figures; of demonstrative understanding and empathy. She also reminds us that communication and interaction need not take the form of verbal communication. Much can be conveyed through silence, and gesture, as Lomer illustrates:

Imagine turning on the bedside lamp
in order to say I love you.
Or not even bothering,
Having learned through experience
Trust in the body
To say everything. 

Themes frequently explored in Lomer’s poetry are love, sex and sensuality– constructed in visually rich dialogue, often directly in relation to nature and colour. For Lomer, the notion of sex and the experience of existing within nature are constantly interwoven, and are one and the same thing. Other poems explore earthy change, elusive transformations and growth, again drawing on connections between nature and human life.  

Light is an ongoing theme in Lomer’s thinking and writing. Light as perspective, as positivity, light as colour; light as study, as obstruction, light as shape-shifting guise. Light as metaphor and light as gesture. It is the author’s fanciful, abstract dialogues that allow interpretative possibilities in the reader’s mind to be endless.

Lomer’s writing constantly has the feeling of being spontaneous, fluid and natural, as if the author is so immersed in the beauty of her surroundings at the time that she simply doesn’t wish to think about rigid formalizations. It seems as if words have not been constructed deliberately to accompany one another. Pairing up syllables according to the letter and tightly knit, formalized, neat sounds clearly isn’t her intention. Nevertheless, Lomer’s lexicon is broad and expansive, and it is this honest, raw quality in her writing that makes her work so endearing, refreshing and inspiring.

Lomer is an adventurer, a surveyor, a voyager, an examiner and an explorer. She filters everything she sees and feels through objects and words. Night Writing is a special collection of poetry that combines the abstract and intuitive with analytical and discerning viewpoints, delivering sensual, acute observations and unique perceptions.